I currently use gmail for emails, but I have been gradually moving away form Google - at least not relying on it for most of my web services. I was wondering what email providers you fine people use if not one of the common webmail ones?

Brian Hunter wrote:I currently use gmail for emails, but I have been gradually moving away form Google - at least not relying on it for most of my web services. I was wondering what email providers you fine people use if not one of the common webmail ones?

You could try gmx.com or mail.com. Horrible web interface, and may be just as much a threat to privacy as Google, but they are alternatives, and both support use of email clients as well as the web interface. Oh, and both are also free....

Hushmail looks quite interesting, but its a bit on the expensive side for my volume of use.

I've had an account with www.spl.at since about 2000 and it's pretty good. For the webmail interface you get to choose between modern and classic, aka Slow and Ugly, and they do POP&IMAP (plus extra space - the free verion's limited to 1GB) for about $30/year iirc. They are hosted in the USA though.

Nuke wrote:I use the mailbox provided by my ISP, front-ended by kmail. I am a bit puzzled why people use web mail - what is the advantage [genuine question]? I know we are not allowed to use it at work.

Some people don't understand email clents....

More to the point, systems like Gmail offer both POP3 and IMAP mail as well as the webmail, and are independent of any ISP. If you've ever gone through the pain of changing ISPs and then trying to get all your contacts to update you eamil address, you'd understand why that is appealing.

paulm wrote: systems like Gmail offer both POP3 and IMAP mail as well as the webmail, and are independent of any ISP. If you've ever gone through the pain of changing ISPs .. you'd understand why that is appealing.

Thanks for that. I guess you still get the pain if you change your web mail provider, but I suppose Gmail & co are more likely to be around long term than a small ISP (although there are other reasons, esp lately, why you may wish to change)

Other niggle with things like gmail is that they tend to have a very large user base, so my email address would be like nuke176@gmail [dot] com. As it is, I am with a relatively small ISP so I am able to have a selfish 4-letter identifier - nuke@[ISP].net, which I value a lot.

My work blocks web mail usage, I believe because they want to monitor our email. We have found that even slightly rude words send a message into a holding area and we must apply for its release. They could not do that with web mail.

Unfortunately, engineering (the nuts and bolts type that I do - whoops, I said "nuts") has a lot of "rude" words in it, almost as if the pioneers took a delight in the inuendo. Like stopc0@k (this is how we must email our stuff), coupling, and the language around male/female pipe fittings. At one of "my" power stations there is a 10m long 2m diameter steam receiver with a hemispherical dead end to it, set at a slightly rising angle to drain internal condensation. This is referred to as "King Kong's D1@k", even at formal meetings with the Government inspectors, with perfectly straight faces.

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Nuke wrote:I use the mailbox provided by my ISP, front-ended by kmail. I am a bit puzzled why people use web mail - what is the advantage [genuine question]? I know we are not allowed to use it at work.

If you were to change ISP, you would need a new email address. Different ISPs can offer different regimes for archiving old mail.

If you archive all your downloaded mail locally it will probably get purged from your ISP's servers. I lost a year or two's mail when my HD failed while I was too lazy to repair my backup PC fast enough. More recently, upgrading to new hardware meant exporting/importing the whole archive to my new PC. Zzz...

If you rely on your ISP to archive your stuff, you cannot change ISP without either losing it all or pulling it all down anyway. ISPs don't seem to like making that easy.

Enter webmail. Whatever my device, whatever my ISP, wherever I am, all I need is a half-decent web browser and my password. Try picking up POP3 at a cyber cafe!

The paranoid but lazy can use one webmail provider as their public address, set that account to cc all incoming mail to another provider - another web offering or maybe your ISP - and this second provider account to bcc all outgoing mail to the first address. Then use the second provider to send messages but set reply-to to the first provider. That way, you maintain full archives with both providers. Some services won't automatically bcc outgoing mail so you have to rely on your email client to do that.

I have my own domain name and my hosting service provides web/pop/imap email hosting for a few extra quid. I recently started to use gmail to wean my fallback account away from my ISP but given that Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic (The Register) I am now rethinking how much of my life I want to put in the hands of a single supplier.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H

Nuke wrote:I use the mailbox provided by my ISP, front-ended by kmail. I am a bit puzzled why people use web mail - what is the advantage [genuine question]? I know we are not allowed to use it at work.

What other's have said, plus picking up email on multiple devices is key. I use email clients on all my devices, so the web interface isn't a huge issue (plus email clients allows me to use signing and encryption), but being able to access my emails on all my devices is an issue.

Nuke wrote:I have my own domain name and my hosting service provides web/pop/imap email hosting for a few extra quid. I recently started to use gmail to wean my fallback account away from my ISP but given that Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic (The Register) I am now rethinking how much of my life I want to put in the hands of a single supplier.

Thanks guy, I am wondering if that's the best option. How large of a mailbox does your hosting service allow?

guy wrote:I have my own domain name and my hosting service provides web/pop/imap email hosting for a few extra quid. I recently started to use gmail to wean my fallback account away from my ISP but given that Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic (The Register) I am now rethinking how much of my life I want to put in the hands of a single supplier.

Thanks guy, I am wondering if that's the best option. How large of a mailbox does your hosting service allow?

I don't know. For reasons explained, I don't bother to use it for archiving, I just funnel stuff through it. Gmail is/was my attempt to remedy that. FYI I use uk2.net to host my domain.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H